Individual reporting in BARS

S&N expands BARS with a report designer

Financial statement analysis using BARS aims to determine the probability of a company defaulting within the next twelve months. The financial statement analysis application gives a uniform presentation of company reports using the pre-set BARS classification scheme. The reports, which are generated to support credit decisions, reflect the bank's own classification scheme and the key indicators that are defined by the bank. The reports are designed so that analysts and risk managers can quickly get an overview of the company's commercial situation and receive an early warning of particular developments, such as an impending liquidity problem. The content and layout of the reports were previously defined as part of the bank-specific customisation process and were subsequently implemented by S&N.

During a BARS user group meeting, the participants expressed the wish to have the ability to customise reporting more flexibly within BARS. In particular, it should be possible to modify reports and key indicators within BARS itself, without needing a new release. The S&N project team took on board the requirements of the banks involved and created the concept of an integrated report designer within BARS. The BARS Report Designer is now an integral part of the BARS product installation and offers the user the ability to define their own key indicators within the system and to create customized reports.

The user has complete flexibility to decide which line items, totals and key indicators are to appear in the report. The user can even specify or change the formulas by which key indicators are calculated. The Report Designer has access to both the current financial year's figures and the previous year's values and to the differences between these.

The BARS Report Designer provides a number of other advantages:

It provides access to the complete range of layout options. The reports are clearly structured with headings, sub-headings and blank lines. It is possible to define the typeface, type size, font colour and background colour in each cell of a report.

The newly created reports will be seamlessly integrated into BARS. As soon as they are released by the author, they are immediately available to all BARS users in the report menu.

As with the "classic" BARS reports, the key indicators and totals in the new individual reports are not stored, but are calculated only when the reports are generated. This means that in BARS it is not necessary to migrate data or reports after changes in the latter, as is the case in other systems.

The preparation of reports by analysts or employees of the Bank reduces the customizing workload. A BARS project can thus be completed with a smaller budget.

A very important advantage is the significant reduction in project time. S&N can now begin to implement or even complete the project before the reports are completely defined. In the future, the BARS user can perform this task, completely independently of which version of BARS has been implemented.

If you want to learn more about the BARS Report Designer, please contact us at: Claus Hoffmann; Turn on Javascript!